Bah Humbug Blog

Monday, 23 December 2002

I'm going to make one last try at getting this Christmas blog thing more or less right, before heading off for the family homestead where Christmas will be celebrated with a pork roast cooked in the Weber barbecue out in the back yard. On the way I might squeeze in a personal commemoration of childhood's Boxing Day lunches by slipping a Plumrose tinned ham into the Salvation Army collection box at Safeway (Plumrose seem to be the only company left producing those oval tins of the better quality stuff). The pork roast, by the way, isn't an annual fixture: some years when the hunting's been good we tuck in to good piece of her Majesty's venison, provided by my brother-in-law who is both a responsible gun owner and a responsible fishing-rod owner, among other things.

On a purely administrative note, I've decided to make a few additions to the blog roll, before I retire it in its present form. I'm not sure what the new form will be: I'll deal with that after Christmas. In the meantime, to stop John Howard getting lonely as the only intentional humourist I've added James Russell's Hot Buttered Death to this category. Simon Crean has been relegated to the Accidental Humour category for the foreseeeable future and I've made a few additions to the serious category. The whole classification system is eccentric to the point of self-indulgence, which is why it's up for revision in the new year, but I thought I'd try to wring a last bit of value out of it before I replace it with something more wildly eccentric and self-indulgent.

One corrigendum is slightly overdue, for anyone who decides to browse the archives: in the post Just Don't Fire the Thing please read "Andorra" for "Liechtenstein", "France" for "Austria", "Spain" for "Switzerland" and "Krupps" for "Krupps" throughout. I finally tracked down the book (George Thayer's The War Business) where the story originally appeared as a short footnote. I have tried to correct the original post accordingly, but this is Blogger after all.

So with one final, token "Bah Humbug!", it's time to go off and enjoy the keeping of Christmas as it is done in the Trotsky clan. One thing I won't be worrying about, and that's self-indulgent Canucks who think it's a good idea to put up billboards decrying the whole tradition. They don't contribute anything to a reasoned consideration of how Christmas should be kept but that debate is pretty well over for this year. It's time to get on with the serious business of enjoying ourselves for a few days.